In This Issue

Reporting

The director Wes Anderson is making a movie in a large studio in the East End of London while seated at his desk in Montparnasse, in Paris. His workspace is as carefully arrayed as the set of one of his films. A boxy nineteen-seventies touch-tone telephone rests on a dark-wood Art…

Song Hee-suk was a model citizen of North Korea. “I lived only for Marshal Kim Il-sung and for the fatherland,” she said not long ago. “I never had a thought otherwise.” Her enthusiasm for the regime made her sound like the heroine of a propaganda film, and she looked the…

Born in Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia, Maja Matarić originally wanted to study languages and art. After she and her mother moved to the United States, in 1981, her uncle, who had immigrated some years earlier, pressed her to concentrate on computers. As a graduate student…

Shouts & Murmurs

Fanshawe had just the one name. He didn’t mind this, having come from a long line of single-name Fanshawes. Fanshawe’s father, also, was Fanshawe—just Fanshawe—while his mother, née Richardson, had never been known by any name but that until she married Fanshawe’s father…

No, the cartoonist below didn’t get lazy. Instead, we want you, the reader, to make the cartoon yourself, as part of our new feature, the Cartoon Kit Contest. Each month, we’ll post a new contest online. Using the backdrop, characters, and props provided, submit your own cartoon…

Fiction

For three weeks, I saw them every day, and now I don’t know what has become of them. I’ll probably never see them again—at least, not her. Summer conversations, and even confidences, rarely lead anywhere. I nearly always saw them at the beach, where it’s difficult to get…

The Critics

Patrick Marber’s “After Miss Julie” (a Roundabout Theatre Company production at the American Airlines), a version of August Strindberg’s gnarly, pathfinding 1888 tragedy about class division and desire, puts a new engine in an old chassis; the problem is internal combustion…

In 1919, a Midwestern auto salesman named Harry Hahn and his French war bride, Andrée, got in touch with Joseph Duveen, the famous New York art dealer, with an offer to sell what they claimed was an original painting by Leonardo da Vinci. Duveen publicly dismissed the work as a …

This convivial memoir by a distinguished publisher charts a lifetime of cooking and consumption, from childhood efforts to conceal from a grandmother the mediocrity of her culinary efforts to the contentment of making a blueberry pie for grandchildren. Naturally, there are many publisher…

Roth’s slender thirtieth novel is about a famous stage actor in his sixties who has lost his ability to act. “Shorn of his skills, alone, workless, and in persistent pain,” he confines himself to his farmhouse in upstate New York. His solitude and despair are broken by an affair…

In this understated novel, Gardam returns to the successful barrister and judge Sir Edward Feathers, the protagonist of her deliciously acerbic “Old Filth.” The complementary tale, told largely from the point of view of Feathers’s wife, Betty, a fellow-“Raj orphan,” begins…

This past June, Representative Mike Castle held a town-hall meeting at a community center in Georgetown, Delaware. Castle, a Republican, is the state’s only House member, and he had invited half a dozen health-care experts to take questions from his constituents. A woman in a red…

The safest and loneliest place in the world, for a devotee of modern art, is within arm’s length of any first-rate painting by Arshile Gorky, the subject of a galvanically moving retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In that zone, where the artist’s decisions register…

In “Amelia,” Hilary Swank, playing Amelia Earhart, the celebrity aviatrix of the nineteen-twenties and thirties, has a big, toothy smile, high cheekbones, and short hair that seems to have been chopped with a knife. Earhart’s clothes—men’s pants, shirts, and leather flying…

The Talk of the Town

In 2008, half the people who watched the Fox News Channel were over sixty-three, which is the oldest demographic in the cable-news business, and, according to a poll, the majority of the ones who watched the most strident programs, such as Sean Hannity’s and Bill O’Reilly’s…

Among the grandees of the Princeton University faculty, past and present, Cornel West is the only one to have appeared in two sequels of “The Matrix,” playing a Zion Elder called Councillor West; recorded songs with both André 3000 and John Mellencamp; and seen his words quoted…

The conceptual artist Rob Pruitt was sitting in a downstairs room at the Guggenheim Museum the other day, listing all the things he likes about the Oscars. “I love all the conventions: the red-carpet aspect, and the speeches, and the cameras catching the expressions of the people…

Women in Italy have taken to the streets recently to protest the shenanigans of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, but, at a party in Manhattan the other day, a different side of Italian life was being discussed. The event, held in the Madison Avenue store of the leather-goods company…

Before the financial crisis, the banking industry was too concentrated and clubby. And now? It’s even more so. In the midst of the crisis, the country’s four biggest banks—Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo—actually got bigger. Thanks primarily to…

Goings On About Town

“We suggest that you eat with your non-bowling hand,” a note on the menu at Brooklyn Bowl states, in a nod, presumably, to both aim and hygiene, if not to the traditional carelessness of ten-frame dining. This converted warehouse at the northern edge of Williamsburg does triple…

Poems

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